A Hard-Boiled Look at Private Dicks

The Case of the Coffee Cup Cabinet remains unsolved, although I am happy to report that we have recently received a shipment of coffee cups, so that problem has been alleviated. Toque McToque and I were discussing the merits of hiring a private eye, and I mentioned a book in my eighth-grade English classroom called The Hard-Boiled Dicks. It was about private detectives and was published in the 30’s or something, when presumably teenagers wouldn’t have found it snicker-worthy. (Back then did they learn about Homo Erectus and Lake Titicaca in school and not snicker at all?) Still, the title does raise some questions about potential private eyes:

• Is a hard-boiled private dick better than a soft-boiled one?
• How about a dick over easy? Sunny side up dick? Poached dick?
• What about a public dick? Would that be better than a private one?
• How can “Dick” be short for Detective AND Richard? In what reality does that make sense? Do these words have anything in common? It’s like when Spell Check on my email system didn’t recognize the last name Voigts and suggested either “vomits” or Virgos” and I’m thinking, what do these two words have in common other than starting with V and ending with S? However, quite appropriately, it suggested a coworker might want to change spaghetti “carbonara” to “coronary.”
• Speaking of Virgos and vomit, Ubi Caritas has a personal ad online that I will not say anything more about except that he is neither the defendant nor the plaintiff in any pending lawsuits, and I don’t know about you, but that is the first thing I like to know about a man. Also, he wants a woman to be feminine no matter how many years she has spent in the military.
• Hey, at least Ubi Caritas doesn’t put clichés in his personal ads. Hoodoo Head, the other Virgo who makes me want to vomit, is looking for a woman who can make him smile and isn’t selling anything.
• If you are wondering if either Ubi Caritas or Hoodoo Head are hard-boiled dicks, I don’t discuss exes on my blog.
• And the most important question of all: where the @#$%&* is that cabinet???

Famous Hat